Today, an era in torrents is ending.
IsoHunt, probably the second biggest global torrent web site in the world after The Pirate Bay, is shutting down today – days ahead of an one-week deadline.
After reaching a settlement with MPAA, Gary Fung, owner of IsoHunt announced the shutting down of IsoHunt.com:
“Initiating Self Destruct – This is it. We are shutting down isoHunt services a little early. I’m told there was this Internet archival team that wants to make historical copy of our .torrent files, I’m honoured that people think our site is worthy of historical preservation. But the truth is about 95% of those .torrent files can be found off Google regardless and mostly have been indexed from other BitTorrent sites in the first place. So I might as well do a proper send-off to you dear isoHunt users, before final shutdown sequence on Tuesday. It’s been an adventure in the last 10.5 years working on isoHunt, a privilege working with some of the smartest guys I’ve worked with, and my life won’t be the same without this journey. For what I’m working on next, please look up my blog on Google and follow me there. Because as the Terminator would say with a German accent, I’ll be backkk. – Gary Fung”
It’s doubtful whether that whopping $110 million dollars will be paid to MPAA, although it is estimated that Gary Fung will be strong-armed into paying back several million dollars; the lawsuit went on for seven years, during which IsoHunt generated ample money from its constant torrent traffic, which according to the lawsuit included pirated movies.
IsoHunt.com is among the top 500 most visited web sites on the Internet, with an Alexa ranking of 420.
We’re wondering, what will happen to the domain name?
No way he can pay it back, my guess domain will be given to the other partying where they will educate visitors on piracy, watch for a new world record bounce rate to be set.